Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar spent the afternoon receiving devotees by appointment. A succession of smartly dressed people who desired his blessing and had travelled to the outskirts of Bangalore knelt before him as they asked for help, bending their faces to his neatly kept toes in respect and submission. Gayatri, a management consultant, had waited a year for this moment. She was determined to get Shankar’s blessing before opening a new subsidiary in Dubai with her business partner. “I can tell you very confidently, not even [becoming] a mother got me this feeling,” she said, after the guru had given his endorsement.
When it was all over, Shankar, dressed in pristine white robes that bunched over his waist, was bundled into a white SUV with a small entourage and driven deeper into his ashram to greet more fans. As his car bumped along the potholed roads, devotees hailed the man they call “the master”, a saint in a Kia.
Shankar, 66, is among India’s most famous living godmen, the name bestowed on the spiritual leaders to whom hundreds of thousands across this vast nation turn for wisdom on how to live, how to run companies and how to play politics. Celebrated for giving Hindu philosophy a secular appeal, he’s been feted by the powerful, from Joe Biden to India’s prime minister Narendra Modi.
Thousands of people across the world have renounced the traps of everyday life — alcohol, deadlines, commuting — to volunteer full-time with Shankar’s Art of Living organisation, a meditation empire stretching over more than 180 countries, which markets its courses as a cure for stress. Shankar claims that eliminating anxiety is the path to world peace. By the guru’s own estimation, the largely volunteer-run organisation has amassed assets worth more than $120mn since it began in 1981.
Beyond its power to shape hundreds of thousands of lives, Shankar’s mesmeric influence is, like that of other modern gurus, a magnet for money and power. That happens by design, according to R Gopalakrishnan, a former business executive and management writer, “Without influence, the godman is just another hermit in some little place.”
Some misuse their influence. In the past decade, abuses by powerful godmen have shown how vulnerable people can fall prey to charlatans. Several spiritualists in India have been jailed, charged with rape, murder, even forced castrations. They have been accused of creating cults; one godman lays claim to founding a brand-new Hindu nation. Influential yogi and businessman Baba Ramdev was reprimanded by India’s securities regulator in 2021 for telling followers that investing in his company, then called Ruchi Soya, would make them a crorepati (millionaire).
Shankar has not been linked to criminal activity, but he’s no stranger to controversy. Art of Living has denied several accusations of land encroachment and is battling a fine imposed by an environmental court for alleged damage caused by a festival it hosted for 3.5mn people on the Yamuna river plain near New Delhi in 2016. Yet the guru remains a favourite of India’s middle classes, his constantly expanding empire the result of a spiritual celebrity living in the real world.
As the Kia pulled up outside the ashram’s yoga school, security guards held back the crowd. Shankar removed his rectangular Ray-Ban sunglasses and got ready to run the gauntlet of adoring fans. One group snapped at me angrily when I inadvertently obscured their view. A grid of family members were trying to watch via video call. Meanwhile, a band of aides scurried about, relieving Shankar of the offerings being thrust into his hands: flowers, silk scarves, sweets, money, letters. By the time he’d finished, the boot of the SUV was crammed. In the midst of everything, the long-haired, bearded Shankar smiled and blessed, not with the handshaking gusto of a politician but with a kind of flowing motion, like a Tai Chi practitioner.
The term “guru” is often used to mean expert. In India your guru is your spiritual guide and teacher, and possibly someone with whom you have a deeply emotional relationship. Regions across the 1.4bn-strong nation have their own local gurus. But celebrity godmen like Shankar and the motorcycling spiritualist Sadhguru have become an industry since India liberalised its economy 30 years ago, creating new wealth and deepening inequality. Ritika Periwal, an Art of Living meditation teacher, told me that the crowd that day included more than 2,000 villagers from rural parts of West Bengal, “who’ve literally been saving up everything to be able to come here and meet him for a few seconds”. They’re here to seek his advice on everything from getting their children married to helping their farm through a crisis, she said.
The web in general and social media in particular have helped the godmen grow their reach exponentially. Shankar, who was dictating a tweet when I first met him earlier in the day, is constantly accompanied by an aide whose job is to curate his social media presence. He has 5.5mn Facebook and 4.2mn Twitter followers, to whom he broadcasts advice and teachings, ancient philosophy for the burnt-out middle classes, in both English and Hindi. His Art of Living podcasts appear exclusively on Spotify, thanks to an audio partnership with the streaming service signed in 2021 for an undisclosed sum.
Darkness had fallen by the time Shankar reached a lady with bobbed hair who was visibly distraught. She was going through a bitter divorce, a media co-ordinator explained to me, and said her husband had taken their children. Shankar lingered, instructing her to tell her husband to come and talk with him, and that she should get a job and stand on her own feet. She was still crying when he left. Shankar’s advice is not always comforting. He once remarked, “When you get hurt, it is not only the other person at fault. If you had been strong and skilful, nobody could have abused you.”
That doesn’t always sit well, even with those in Shankar’s close orbit. In the early 2000s, critics began publishing anonymous posts, accusing Art of Living of misappropriating funds, pushy sales tactics, brainwashing, running a cult and psychological harm. Art of Living strongly denied the allegations at the time and later sued two of the bloggers in a US court, alleging libel and publication of trade secrets. A settlement was reached, but Art of Living paid both sides’ legal fees and the case was dismissed with prejudice, meaning the defendants cannot be retried and should therefore not be considered guilty. The bloggers’ criticism stayed online. But at least one of these blogs has been blocked by a Bangalore judge, meaning no one here at the ashram, which is just outside the city, can read it.
For his biggest event of the day, Shankar addressed thousands crammed into a meditation hall for satsang, a communal prayer that includes music and dancing and ends in a surprise entertainment. Today, it was a performance by a sword-wielding martial artist. “People don’t have to bring me flowers, shawls, nothing,” Shankar told the gathered faithful via a microphone, with a touch of remonstration. “Just come with your smiles.”
There’s a hypnotic quality to his voice, a high-pitched yet cooing, honeyed, singsong tone that has ushered millions into a meditative stupor. But there’s also something unsettling. His sister and biographer Bhanumathi Narasimhan has described how, as a young man, Shankar’s voice seemed not to belong to his body but was “connected to a field that was beyond and unknown to us”.
Then it was time for group meditation. Shankar’s teachings have an army of supporters worldwide, and a handful of peer-reviewed studies have found his breathing techniques effective as part of treatment for depression. One course participant of a silent retreat tells me that although she found Shankar’s ashram “a bit culty”, the meditation and reflection had helped her through a tough time.
Today the guru leads meditation wordlessly. Lights go down and thousands of people disappear into themselves. Afterwards, a male voice bellowed from the crowd: “LOVE YOU, GURUJI!”
“I know,” the guru replied coyly.
Shankar had arranged to meet with me by the lake at the heart of his ashram. He sat leaning on the arm of a wooden chair that his aides carry from place to place for his use. Shankar had joked earlier that one benefit of ageing is no longer being expected to jump up and greet followers. He wore an air of focused concentration but, up close, did not give off the high-wattage charisma he had exuded to the crowd the previous day. “Of course, when you do something good and when you inspire people, they really start loving you and following you,” he said, explaining his influence.
The physical evidence of that love was all around. The ashram, built on land in Shankar’s home state originally leased by the government, is far bigger than I expected. Situated on 450 acres, it is a permanent home to about 3,000 devotees and can host 100,000 people for major events. There are facilities for detoxing, an ayurveda spa, a research institute and a hospital offering everything from emergency care to “ozone therapy”. Followers noted this land was bare and rocky before Shankar arrived.
The grandson of a clairvoyant, Shankar was born to a religious, middle-class, south-Indian family in 1956. His father worked in the car industry. Like many godmen, stories of Shankar’s childhood have a distinct whiff of the fantastical. In one, he miraculously avoids being crushed by iron chains as a baby. Another claims that by the age of four he was able to recite from the holy text The Bhagavad Gita, a 700-verse tome written in Sanskrit. What’s certain is that as a teenager he stumbled upon transcendental meditation and it changed his life.
In the 1980s, Shankar claimed to have developed a novel form of meditation, which he trademarked as Sudarshan Kriya (Proper Vision by Purifying Action). He broke away from his teacher at the time, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who had spread transcendental meditation internationally and taught The Beatles. One scientific paper describes Sudarshan Kriya’s central breathing technique as “rhythmic hyperventilation”, and hundreds of students at the Indian Institute of Science protested against a talk Shankar gave there, worried that it endorsed his “unscientific” views. Nonetheless, it was the method that helped him make his name.
Today, whenever he is in India, which is not really that often, Shankar receives a stream of officials from across the political spectrum at his ashram. He denies they are after his followers’ votes and says he will never endorse any individual or party. He has met with prime minister Modi several times and Gopalakrishnan counts him among the godmen who have a “mutually reinforcing relationship” with the government. Shankar says he has no political affiliations.
The rise of India’s modern godmen has overlapped with the ascent of Hindu nationalism under Modi, who has promoted many of the ancient practices championed by the gurus alongside his ideology of Hindutva. It’s a word that literally means Hindu-ness but has come to stand for Hindu nationalism.
In 2014, Shankar and other civic and spiritual figures were heading a national anti-corruption movement that felled the government of then-prime minister Manmohan Singh. If Singh’s secular Congress party was the loser, its arch rival the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), led by Modi, was one of the winners. Modi was elected premier that same year. “When we started this movement, it benefited certain parties,” Shankar acknowledged.
Modi was chief minister of Gujarat state in 2002 when it was wracked by bloody intercommunal violence that killed nearly 2,000 people, mostly Muslims. His role in these riots is contested; human rights groups allege his state government failed to protect Muslims. Shankar said he was convinced that Modi was not responsible and publicly defended him at the time.
Yet outside his ashram, the deepening polarisation in India worries the guru. When I asked him if the BJP’s Hindutva has made India more or less peaceful, Shankar said he believed there was less terrorism, but “I won’t say all is very rosy . . . There are some people who are doing all this rhetoric, which is so painful. And there are people who create hate between the communities . . . wanting to divide and rule.”
The perception that India under BJP rule is hostile to its roughly 14 per cent Muslim population was reinforced by a 2019 act passed by parliament, offering a pathway to Indian citizenship to people from minority religions in nearby Muslim-majority nations which excluded Muslims. “There were many wrong steps,” said Shankar of the Citizenship Amendment Act, which triggered protests in India. “Maybe with good intention, but I would say India can take a lot of help.”
The same year, he mediated in a long-running interfaith dispute over a religious site Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, but became embroiled in controversy when he warned that India risked turning into civil-war-torn Syria. Muslim leaders took him to court over the remark, accusing him of threatening the community. It wasn’t “a threat, it’s only airing a concern,” said Shankar, sounding distressed. “You know, when people want to twist your words, they can just twist.
“We are an international organisation. We are not limited to Hindutva,” he added. “We don’t talk on the boundaries, country or cultural boundaries. No, we say the whole world is one family. Our whole philosophy, idea, is very different.”
I asked him what his ambitions are for Art of Living. “See, if I had an ambition this could not happen. I can’t take care of others. I have no ambition for myself,” he said, not quite answering the question. He put the organisation’s growth down to a sort of snowball effect — one person learning meditation wants to teach three people, etc. Art of Living has “organically expanded”, he said. “I don’t make much effort to expand anything.”
“Make your smile cheaper and your anger expensive,” reads a sign in the ashram that typifies Shankar’s wisdom. Another advertises a paid-for “happiness app”. I start paying attention to the many chained silver collection boxes, emblazoned with QR codes for digital donations. The Art of Living does not appear to be short on funds. A gargantuan new meditation hall is being constructed over an old helipad to make space for more visitors.
Shankar insists his “movement doesn’t have any connection with business”. But commercial enterprise is a presence throughout the ashram. Devotees purchase his framed portraits, books, Art of Living-branded clothing and yoga mats in numerous shops. You can buy an audio version of The Bhagavad Gita in multiple languages for Rs12,000 (£120). A travel agency helps visitors book flights, cabs and holidays. In addition to the huge kitchen serving free meals, there are cafés selling pizza, kombucha “brewed by meditators” and birthday cakes, popular for being blessed by Shankar, at Rs2,000 each.
There are so many places to spend money in the ashram that it feels a little like Disneyland for meditation. Bharathy Harish, managing partner of Madhurya, a high-end clothing and crafts retailer in the ashram, told me it “is an independent entity. It’s just by policy that we support Art of Living’s free schools.” She asked me not to disclose the shop’s monthly revenues or her salary.
Across the ashram, adverts extol Sri Sri Tattva’s ayurvedic products, the biggest business in Shankar’s orbit, which sells everything from branded medicines to cleaning products to a high-end skincare range called Shankara. It is run by his nephew Arvind Varchaswi, who I met in Sri Sri Tattva’s boardroom. Bringing ayurveda, a traditional Indian medicine based on the idea of balance, to the world has “been Gurudev [his Holiness]’s vision”, said the softly spoken Varchaswi, who wore a smartwatch and had a small ponytail. He aims to make Sri Sri Tattva “really big and become a public company”, along the lines of Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali Foods, a household name and a publicly listed company worth $5bn. Varchaswi insisted his uncle was not involved in his business. But Shankar does endorse it, tweeting about Sri Sri Tattva’s Covid therapeutic to his 4.2mn followers, for example.
Shankar’s greatest asset is his volunteers. Rahul Sejwani, 27, volunteers in the Art of Living’s media team and was behind the Spotify deal. His parents are devotees, and he took his first meditation course as a small child. “When I joined, I wasn’t very inclined to spirituality,” said Sejwani. But his devotion to Shankar grew as he felt the guru’s positive influence on his life. A journalism graduate, he left Mumbai to volunteer full-time in 2017. “I don’t think that I’m controlling my life, it’s just happening . . . everything has been so easy, so happy since I’ve come here.”
On my last night at the ashram, a crowd filed into an open amphitheatre around an artificial lake with a stage jutting into it. Some 5,000 people had arrived from Sikkim and West Bengal, according to the media team. As the music grew livelier, groups of young people jumped up and threw their arms about, evangelical superchurch-style. When Shankar’s SUV approached, he waved to the crowd under a cinematically full moon.
A devotee had bought a white hat for the godman, which he obligingly parked on his head. In his commodious chair, surrounded by water and devotees, he had the air of a king. “Any excuse to celebrate life is good,” Shankar told the crowd. “Today, when world is in such a gloomy mood, we must keep these traditions to uplift the spirit . . . There are many divisive forces today. It is time for us to wake up,” he continued, insisting that we must all come together to heal the social fabric. Just briefly, I wondered whether our interview had played on his mind.
As he spoke, Shankar kept blowing his nose. He seemed tired, asking that just one act perform this evening rather than the planned two. And the godman on the throne started to look perfectly human.
Chloe Cornish is the FT’s Mumbai correspondent
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